Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 49.djvu/290

 adequate memorial of herself in ‘A Shadow of Dante: being an Essay towards studying himself, his World, and his Pilgrimage’ (1871), a manual highly valued by Dante scholars.

 ROSSETTI, DANTE GABRIEL (1828–1882), painter and poet, eldest son of Gabriele Rossetti and of Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori (1800–1886), was born on 12 May 1828, at 38 Charlotte Street, Portland Place. His full christian name was Gabriel Charles Dante, but the form which he gave it has become inveterate. [q. v.], the father of the geologist, was his godfather. His father, born at Vasto in the kingdom of Naples on 28 Feb. 1783, had been successively librettist to the opera house and curator of antiquities in the Naples museum, but had been compelled to fly the country for his share in the insurrectionary movements of 1820 and 1821. After a short residence in Malta he came over to England in 1824, and established himself as a teacher of Italian. In 1826 he married the sister of [q. v.] In 1831 he was appointed professor of Italian in King's College. He was a man of high character, an ardent and also a judicious patriot, and an excellent Italian poet; but he is perhaps best remembered by his attempts to establish the esoteric anti-papal significance of the ‘Divine Comedy.’ He published several works dealing with this question, namely a commentary on the ‘Divina Commedia,’ 1826–7 (2 vols.), ‘La Beatrice di Dante,’ 1842, and ‘Sullo Spirito Antipapale che produsse la riforma,’ 1832 (placed on the pontifical index and translated into English by Miss C. Ward, 1834, 2 vols). He died on 26 April 1854, leaving four children, Maria Francesca [see under ], Dante Gabriel, William Michael, and [q. v.] Mr. W. M. Rossetti alone survives (1897).

Dante Rossetti's environment—political, literary, and artistic—was such as to stimulate his precocious powers. At the age of five or six he composed three dramatic scenes entitled ‘The Slave,’ childish in diction, but correct in spelling and metre. At the age of eight he went to a preparatory school, and at nine to King's College, which he left at thirteen, having made fair progress in the ordinary branches of knowledge. His reading at home was more important to him; his imagination was powerfully stimulated by a succession of romances, though he does not appear to have been then acquainted with any English poets except Shakespeare, Byron, and Scott. The influence of the last is visible in his boyish ballad of ‘Sir Hugh the Heron,’ written in 1840, and printed three years later at his maternal grandfather's private press. Of artistic attempt we hear comparatively little; he was, however, taught drawing at King's College by an eminent master, [q. v.], and upon leaving school in November 1841 he selected art as his profession. He spent four years at F. S. Cary's drawing academy in Bloomsbury Street, where he attracted notice by his readiness in sketching ‘chivalric and satiric subjects.’ Neither there nor at the antique school of the Royal Academy, where he was admitted in 1846, was his progress remarkable. The fact appears to have been that in his impatience for great results he neglected the slow and tiresome but necessary subservient processes. His literary work was much more distinguished, for the translations from Dante and his contemporaries, published in 1861, were commenced as early as 1845. Up to this time he seems to have known little of Dante, notwithstanding his father's devotion to him. By 1850 his translation of Dante was sufficiently advanced to be shown to Tennyson, who commended it, but he advised careful revision, which was given. His poetical faculty received about this time a powerful stimulus from his study of Browning and Poe, both of whom he idolised without imitating either. He would seem, indeed, to have owed more at this period to imaginative prose writers than to poets, although he copied the whole of Browning's ‘Pauline’ at the British Museum. ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ ‘The Portrait,’ the splendid sonnets ‘Retro me Sathana’ and ‘The Choice,’ with other remarkable poems, were written about 1847. They manifest nothing of young poets' usual allegiance to models, but are absolutely original—the product, no doubt, of the unparalleled confluence of English and Italian elements in his blood and nurture. The result was as exceptional as the process.

The astonishing advance in poetical powers from ‘Sir Hugh the Heron’ to ‘The Blessed Damozel’ had not been visibly attended by any corresponding development of the pictorial faculty, when in March 1848 Rossetti took what proved the momentous step of applying for instruction to Ford Madox Brown. His motive seems to have been impatience with the technicalities of academy